Some people have called our current situation a reproducibility crisis. It’s hard to know how to define, exactly, the word crisis. But what we do know is that, of the efforts to try to systematically reproduce findings, whether they be in cancer biology, whether they be in psychology, the success rate has not been impressive.

Moran Cerf is a computational neuroscientist at Caltech. Some of his work is really interesting. Here, though, he describes his life before science—as a hacker and security tester. It’s easily one of the best stories I’ve heard in a while.